Technique · rendering

Forced blanking

Turning the display off so the game can write video memory freely, at the cost of a blank screen while it does.

stubAlso: forced blank, screen off, rendering off, display offUpdated 2026-10-23

A video chip drawing the screen can’t take writes to its memory. Turning rendering off frees it, so games clear the name tables, draw a new screen, or load tiles with the screen dark, usually between screens where a blank frame goes unnoticed.

See also

Mentioned in

Games

Every claim about this mechanic, by game (3)
Mega Man 4 1991Mega Man 4's routine that fills a name table and its attributes with one value is Mega Man 3's fill_nametable, byte for byte.Code
Mega Man 4's four routines after its name table buffer flush, two that reset or set bits of PPUCTRL and two that turn rendering off and on, are Mega Man 3's disable_nmi, dead_code_enable_nmi, rendering_off, and rendering_on instruction for instruction; only the zero-page counter the last two step differs ($EE in Mega Man 3, $EA in Mega Man 4).Code
Mega Man 5 1992Mega Man 5's routine that fills a name table and its attributes with one value is Mega Man 4's, byte for byte; Mega Man 5 follows it with routines that clear the sprite buffer and the object slots.Code